Guitar Parts

Rare Relic Guitars

Do you want a unique looking guitar that only belongs to you? If you are a guitarist and you want a nice looking “axe”, you are in the right place. Choose a custom hand painted or a relic guitar will satisfy your desire. You can select whichever guitar you like as the base.

Rare Relic Guitars

We specialize in customize vintage style guitars and professional on guitar relic work. All relic guitars we made are all Hand-Crafted Custom-Built vintage style guitar; they all have really cool looking, of course also in a reasonable price. We accept any kind of relic orders, from light age job to heavy relic; our professional craftsmen will bring the guitar with a great aged looking. Looking for a nice vintage style guitar, here is definitely your best choices !

Rare custom shop offers a full line of custom relic finishes; from the classic aged to the medium till ultimate heavily relic . These relic finishes can be selected. The photos below are only a few samples of the type of work we can do; we encourage you the customer to send us a photo and we will go to a great extent to match it. This method allows you the customer to be in control.

Aged to perfection

Our forte is distressing and aging our guitars to achieve that special feeling and tone that can only be earned from years on the road. We offer a variety of different aging levels:

Classic – Very close to NOS, maybe a ding or blemish here and there. It shows minimal signs of wear.

Light – A few dings here and there, light tarnishing on the hardware, looks played but taken care of and never gigged with.

Medium – The closest aging to look like an authentic vintage instrument. Aged hardware, some belt rash, a little forearm arm wear, dings around the edges and a scratch here and there.

Heavy – Large arm wear, large belt rash, dings and scratches all over the place, worn paint finish, looks like its been gigged with its entire life on a regular basis.

Ultimate – More wood showing than paint. Most comfortable to play and sounds the best since there is little finish.

This is where much of our customization comes in. If you have a desired look or feel that you're going for, just let us know and we'll incorporate your desired age and distress level.

We do have absolute advantage in make various shapes of guitars and our professional designers are able to do custom drawings, use professional software and other design tools to design the exact guitar you want thus great extent to help you build your ideal guitar. Also we can specially make the neck profile and thickness to suit your palm or your needs. The hand paint and relic team can do any painting or relic guitar for you. All our guitars and basses are handcrafted by the professional luthiers, they are maybe not match John Cruz or John English, but our guitars are made by professional relic masters according to correct aged guitars making method and production process. The grain and color is natural but not affected, absolutely not sanded with a knife or sand paper by any worker. We will not make anything that we ourselves would not play. Our professional hand-painted and relic team completed lots of very fine works.

We also love the look and feel of a guitar that has seen the road. A gigging guitar has soul, and we aim to capture the essence that only hundreds (or thousands) of live performances can do. We obsess over the details of a well-aged guitar, both aesthetically and tonally. When you pick up one of our distressed guitars, it will feel like it has been played for decades.

The Adantages of our relic guitars

You can find many relic guitars on the market, some of them are cheaper and some more expensive. But ours are absolutely good. Let me tell you now.

Point 1 : Highest Quality Bodies

At our workshop, we are passionate about using the highest quality materials. We love beautiful flame maple, premium alder. We use only the highest quality wood from respected dealers. We want our guitars to stand up to the rigors of the road, so we don’t skimp on quality woods. We specialize in the highest quality bodies made from the tone wood of your choice. Our most popular models sport premium alder, which is known for it’s strength and clear, full-bodied sound. The premium cuts of alder we use are a beautiful white natural color with straight grain pattern and no streaks or knots. It looks superb in our aged finishes peeking out from under opaque nitrocellulose lacquer. Certain transparent finishes and sunburst finishes really make alder into a showpiece.

Our bodies can be ordered in a wide variety of different tone woods, with swamp ash and rosewood being our most popular upgraded options.

If your dream guitar is a little more unique, we offer a wide variety of different body types, cavity routes, specialty neck pockets, binding, or other upgrades that’s ok… we can do that. Just contact us with the details or use our Custom Guitar Builder to explain the details!

Point 2 : Exquisite workmanship

We have exquisite aged guitar making skills and can make it natural and harmonious. Making aged guitars is not to break the guitar and remove paint from it, but means reflecting the bitterness of guitar being used well-worn naturally. The result of aged guitars is to endow the guitar with enough vintage feel and bitterness. As a consequence, aged guitars should not be painted with protective lacquer after being made. If you once saw high-grade aged guitars, you would know that apart from removing paint from the surface of guitar, the last process of making real aged guitars is coloring, which can reflect natural effect. So making a clear coat on aged guitars is very foolish, unprofessional and very ridiculous. Besides, after finish removal, the polishing is also very important and it is a key process. The purpose of polishing is to reduce height differences between places of having and removing polish, which makes the guitar natural and have a age-used feel. If this process can't completely well, the whole guitar will be like simply cut and carved by knife, which is totally destroyed.

Point 3 : Nitrocellulose lacquer absolutely

100% Nitrocellulose lacquer is used on our relic guitars. Nowadays, many relic guitars in the market are using Polyurethane as the finish. Many people don’t know the difference between Polyurethane and Nitro lacquer, it's not easy for them to distinguish the differences. But if you observe very carefully, you will find that the Polyurethane is deep thick to give the guitar a very bright effect while the Nitro lacquer is very thin, which won't make the guitar so bright. As Nitrocellulose lacquer gives an effect of not too bright and is full of bitterness and modernity, which is easy to be made aged and used by most aged guitar manufacturers, but some relic guitar copies in the market place are not made by nitro-lacquer. This is not easy to tell from pictures, but you can find it if you observe very carefully.

Point 4 : Polishing is Important

What's more, the most important point is that even with the same tools, materials and manufacture method, producing a random relic guitar following the fixed style, making exactly the same guitar with the pictures provided by customer is totally different concept. Because it requires that luthiers should hold enough excellent artistic capacity and powers of observation, and can finally make the guitar look like the original one.

Point 5 : Vintage Bridge and Quality Wires

Even all bridges we use are vintage-bridges; however they are still divided into three grades according to the price, the price from low to high to meet different request of all our customers. To ensure optimum performance, we are using high quality authentically wires, these wires is maximized to ensure that all electronic parts connection are foolproof.

Point 6 : Mixed hand painting, relic and more other technique to build very unique effects

Our experienced relic masters using hand painting, watermarking, relic and other techniques work out some very nice and freestyle relic guitars. It makes the combination of various techniques to create your own unique guitar become very possible. No matter how complex you design is, or it is not easy to achieve, we will put it into reality for you.

Some samples of our recent relic works

Some of our aged guitars are placed in Rock theme bars and coffee house all around the world, becoming the most outstanding star in their shops; and some more are performed with guitar fans in various different kinds of places. These aged guitars show them more personality and their unique styles. Meanwhile, the price of aged guitars in the market stays at a high level. In addition, our guitars have unique profile and nostalgic feel, all of which give our customers an appreciation space if they sell the guitar to others a second time. It's no wonder---because the price of the service of other aged guitar makers is higher than that of our whole guitar. What's worse, the guitars they made maybe won't reach the perfect effect of our aged guitars.

Real review from our customer

"I am a guitarist from Spain, i am sorry for my so so English, i bought two guitars in this store, here i want to share my experience with you friends, at the beginning, i only want to buy a SRV relic guitar, but it is too expensive at other shops i knew very well, so i googled SRV relic guitar, as you know, luckily, i found them, i was so excited because it is so cheap, i emailed them with some shipping info, then made the payment by PayPal very soon, after i received the guitar, i can not tell how happy i was, the guitar is really wonderful, it is a beautiful girl, and the quality is good too, so i got the biggest interest in this store, i came again, and want to check what else i can get, oh god, when i read carefully, i found they accept custom orders, i think i was too careless when i first came here, maybe the SRV attract me too much, so i inquired them whether they could build a relic guitar i want, As they said in their description, i just provided several pics, they even made it, that is so amazing, which is completely same with what i thought, here i show them for everyone."

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns and we will be happy to help.